Now that we are finished with the first half of 2013, Windows 8 has continued to steadily grow its market share as Windows XP and Windows Vista have been on the decline. According to new data from Net Applications, Windows 8 has now passed the 5% adoption mark and is now more widely used than Windows Vista.

During June, Windows 8 gained 0.83% increasing from 4.27% to 5.10%. At the same time, Windows 7 usage fell by 0.48% declining from 48.5% to 44.37% of the market. The paltry gain for June was Windows 8's biggest gain for 2013.

Net Applications’ data was captured from 160 million unique visitors each month and clean from the monitoring of about 40,000 websites for clients.

Microsoft is hoping for a further uptick in adoption when the final version of Windows 8.1 airs later this year.

Proprietary software from a company that forgot they ever sold it will fail under a new OS ... the tool is broken

Proprietary software "upgraded" for the new OS will function in a different manner ... the tool is broken

Hardware that is shop specific was released and the company no longer supports legacy hardware ... the tool is broken

The cost of regular upgrades because the OS is "old" can include retooling a factory due to equipment that is "legacy"

These cases all require "old" unsupported OSes that should be isolated from the general internet. Access to the outside world should be restricted for these machines. This can cause a need for each employee to have 2 terminals ... one for the legacy system(s) and one to safely access the outside world.

It is nice to say that businesses should pay $20k-$30k per seat every 2 or 3 years because the OS vendor needs repeat sales, but when that is the only reason for the upgrade, then it is an unnecessary expense that destroys earnings.

This is actually a major selling point for Linux. Linux support for "old" versions will exist as long as there is a user community having a use for that generation of Linux. Also transferring legacy software and hardware from a dead line to a similar supported Linux/Unix is minor compared to the cost of upgrading OSX or Windows. This difference is due to the ability to add the hooks for the old drivers to a newer Linux/Unix ... the old hardware will also usually have a user group where information can be traded.